U.S. Forest Service--Forest Area Destroyed by Fire Has Doubled

Posted on May 09, 2016

The New Yorker: "According to a Forest Service report published last April, 'Climate change has led to fire seasons that are now on average 78 days longer than in 1970.' Over the past three decades, the area destroyed each year by forest fires has doubled, and the service’s scientists project that it’s likely to 'double again by midcentury.' A group of scientists who analyzed lake cores from Alaska to obtain a record of forest fires over the past ten thousand years found that, in recent decades, blazes were both unusually frequent and unusually severe. 'This extreme combination suggests a transition to a unique regime of unprecedented fire activity,' they concluded.